Since 2008, I've added every supercut I could find to a sprawling blog post. With nearly 150 of these videos, and more
being added weekly, it's turned from a blog post into a minor
obsession

Earlier this year, I collaborated with NYC-based artist Michael
Bell-Smith on Supercut.org,
a 24-hour hack to make a supercut composed entirely out of other
supercuts, along with a randomised supercut browser.

Today, I'm happy to announce that I've relaunched the site to
let you browse the entire collection in different ways, subscribe
to updates, or submit your own to the growing list. I'm also
releasing the entire dataset, which you can download at the end of
this column.

To understand the rise of this new genre, let's take a look back
at how it began and how it's evolved in the last three years.

The proto-cuts
While the web popularised the genre, the art world was
experimenting with similar film cut-ups for years before YouTube
was a gleam in Chad &
Steve's eyes.

Brooklyn-based critic Tom McCormack wrote the definitive
history of the supercut, tracing its origins back to
found-footage cinema, like Bruce Conner's A
MOVIE from 1958.

But it wasn't until the 1990s that clear descendants of the
genre emerged. Matthias Müller's Home
Stories (1990) reused scenes from 1950s and 1960s
Hollywood melodramas, filmed directly from the TV set, to show
actresses in near-identical states of distress.

Christian Marclay's Telephones (1995)
showed famous actors answering ringing telephones in a string of
surreal, disjointed conversations throughout Hollywood history.
Edited together, the cadence and rhythm of nonstop clips feels very
reminiscent of modern supercuts.

Apple tried to license Marclay's film for the launch of the
iPhone in 2007, but he refused. Instead, they made their
own, borrowing the idea wholesale. (Marclay decided not to
sue.)

As far as I can tell, the earliest supercut native to the web
was Chuck Jones' Buffies from
2002, which isolated every mention of "Buffy" from the first season
of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

While there were rare exceptions, supercuts really didn't start
proliferating online until around 2006. Why then? The likely cause:
YouTube.

Before YouTube, it was incredibly difficult to both find and
share video. After YouTube's launch in 2005, searching through big
chunks of film and TV's recorded history became simple. Perhaps
more importantly, sharing the video with others didn't require
server space, a huge amount of bandwidth, and a deep knowledge of
video codecs. It just worked.

The result was that clips were easy to find and even easier to
distribute. Combined with the rise of BitTorrent
and the availability of affordable, easy-to-use video editing
software like iMovie,
it was the perfect environment for video remixing. The only missing
ingredient is the time and passion to make it happen.

Supercuts as criticism
When I first started tracking the trend in 2008, almost every
example was created by a superfan. Creating videos with hundreds of
edits takes a staggering amount of time, and the only people
willing to do it were those who were in love with the source
material.

In the last three years, the form seems to have evolved from fan
culture to criticism.

But recently, it's being used for more serious criticism:
calling out politicians and the news media. The Daily Show
pioneered the reuse of archival news footage and quick edits to
point out the absurdity of the news media and political figures,
but online video remixers are taking it much further.

Video remixing group Wreck & Salvage took Sarah Palin's
speech about the Arizona shootings and removed everything but the
sound of her breathing. The result, Sarah's
Breath, was a creepy example of supercut as political
speech.

In March, artist Diran Lyons released one of the most epic
supercuts ever -- chronicling every time President Obama says "spending" in
the complete video archive posted to the White House website. The
result is six minutes long with over 600 edits.

The results are effective. Just as it was used to point out film
clichés, a supercut sends a message about a public figure's speech
in a very short period of time. For that reason, I wouldn't be
surprised to see supercuts make their way into 2012 campaign
ads.

Breaking it down
I wanted to learn more about the structure of these videos, so I
enlisted the help of the anonymous workforce at Amazon's Mechanical
Turk to analyse the videos for me.

Using the database of 146 videos, I asked them to count the
number of clips in each video, along with some qualitative
questions about their contents. Their results were interesting.

When looking at the source of the videos, nearly half come from
film with a little over one-third sourced from TV shows. The rest
are a mix of real-life events, videogames, or a combination of
multiple types, as you can see below.

According to the turker estimates, the average supercut is
composed of about 82 cuts, with more than 100 clips in about 25% of
the videos. Some supercuts, about 5%, contain over 300 edits!

I asked the turkers whether each supercut was comprehensive,
collecting every possible example, or if they were just a
representative sample. For example, collecting every one of
Kramer's entrances from Seinfeld vs. a selection of explosions from
action films. The results were split, with about 60% comprehensive.
This could be attributed to film cliché supercuts, which don't
attempt to be thorough.

Finally, I was wondering whether each video's creator was a fan
or critic of the source material. The workers surveyed said that
most supercuts were created by fans, about 73% of the time. This
style of video remixing may be useful for criticism, but for now,
it seems to mostly be a labour of love.